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Author's profile photo Anita Gibbings
Anita Gibbings
August 21, 2013 2 minute read

Driving Business Intelligence Success with SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards

I wanted to share with you some successful dashboards projects that might inspire you to push business intelligence (BI) adoption further across your own organization. Check out these links to learn more:

  1. Fast Company article featuring ’Where the Money is Flowing’: Learn about built-in dashboards with the Emerging Markets Private Equity Association. You can play with most of the data to help you understand where to invest even without being a member.
  2. FedEx replay of SAPPHIRE presentation:  Listen to how FedEx rolled out SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards to 1800 stores and freed up 10% of its managers’ time. You just have to see the movie trailer they made to promote BI adoption.
  3. Continental Resources video from SAPPHIRE2013: See how its dashboards have given its executives the data they need to make decisions.
  4. JRS Pharmarketing blog post: Read about this innovative mobile dashboard use case that JRS built with SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards and our partner Inovista
  5. Endress + Hauss blog post: Learn how Endress + Hauser managed a very successful rollout of SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards across multiple functional areas

What’s New with SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards 4.1

While I’m at it, I’d  also like to give you an update on what’s new with SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards 4.1.

To begin with, let’s remember that in April 2012, SAP released a statement of direction for dashboarding that presented a new technology stack, SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio. But this is going to be a unification in the longer term, not the end of SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards. Let’s be clear that SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards still has a development team in place and new features coming in 4.1 and 4.2.  For the original Statement of Direction you can access the webinar and the blog post with attached official document and webinar slides.

The list of new enhancements for SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards 4.1 is pretty large considering the team was full out delivering the mobility functionality that came at the end of 2012 with the 4.0 SP5 release. The focus for new enhancements with version 4.1 has been on extending the mobile functionality.  SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards 4.1 is currently in ramp up and we expect that it will be generally available in the fall.

So that the large ecosystem of partners can make their add-ons mobile, investment has been in building a Javascript SDK.  Some example of partners who are continuing to invest heavily in Dashboards and utilize the new mobile SDK are:  APOS with location intelligence (watch the demo video) and Antivia with XWIS drill downs (watch the video).

Customers now will be able to mobilize dashboards built with the QaaWS connection, not just the query panel – solving perhaps the biggest pain point with the original mobile release. Officially, SAP has never supported BI web services connections even for the Flash version, however this appears to also work for mobile dashboards in 4.1.

Other new features include:

  • Offline support
  • New mobile charts (waterfall and bubble plot)
  • Flash Variables supported in mobile
  • Chart data labels supported in mobile
  • Component Dynamical Position

Watch this short video to hear more about the SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards 4.1 release.  If you would like to see a demo of the mobile dashboards features you can watch this short demo.

Please join the conversation around Dashboards by joining one of our customer groups , Idea Place or responding to this blog. And if you have your own inspiring Dashboards success story, don’t forget that you can show case them in the Dashboards Gallery.

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      Author's profile photo Former Member
      Former Member

      Hi Anita,

      Thanks for your post on the new features of Business Objects Dashboards 4.1.

      I am ex SAP employee and I have been extensively working on SAP Business Objects Dashboard projects using Dashboard Designer. One of the common feature from customer when I am working for SAP or now is there is no option of multiple select options in Dashboard Designer tool. The only component we have is List Builder and as you can know that takes a big real estate and not visually appealing when building the dashboard.

      It will be really nice if you can add a multiple select component option for combo box, List box so that the project we are working can handle multiple select options and also mobile compatible.

      I have put this in the idea place and if you can raise have a poll about this feature to the dashboard designer develper community and I am pretty sure every developer who is working will say "yes" to this as this every company wants to pass multiple values to their dashboards.

      Just want to bring it to your attention and see if we can this in future release.

      Thanks,

      Tagu